Why use old radios?
This, courtesy of Harry Leeming G3LLL (Harry spent most of his life repairing Yaesu radios).
"It may surprise younger Hams to hear that 20-year-old rigs like the TS-830 or the FT-101ZD will outperform some much more modern equipment in the receive mode".
"A synthesiser may be more stable than a VFO, but the noise that some produce do not help close-in selectivity. The addition of a general coverage receiver to a radio is a good example of taking two steps backwards to march one forward. Most general coverage transceivers use fixed half-octave filters at the front end, whilst the older radios had tunable preselectors. On 14mhz a Ham-band-only rig with a preselector has a front end bandwidth of a few hundred kilohertz, whilst a general coverage unit's front end can be up to 7MHz wide".
"In the 1960's certain Hi-Fi manufacturers tried to make a virtue out of claiming a ridiculously wide 'audo' frequency responses for their amps, in some cases extending from near DC to beyond one MHz. To this nonsense, Peter Walker of the Acoustical Manufacturing Company (Quad) and possibly quoting P Eckersley, comented "The winder you open the windows, the more the muck flies in". This is just as true of Ham receivers as it is in Hi-Fi, and the dynamic range of a general coverage tranceiver with a broadband front end, has to be very much better than that of the older ham-only units, just to give equal performance".
Harry Leeming - G3LLL
The more bells and whistles the new radios get the more compromises must be made to keep the price down or within the price range of the average Ham.
At GM7NVA I use two old Ham Band Only, FT-901Dm's for reception with Beverage and K9AY receiving Loops for 120, 80 and 40m bands. The result is very low noise reception. In many cases signals that are not audible in QRN/QRM on normal antennas (verticals or dipoles) area clear S 5-9+ on this system. The K9AY loop sytem is switchable in 4 directions. Japan and West Coast USA signals are more than often, non existant on most low antennas on 80m and 120. On verticals, which are noisy on receive anyhow, it can be very difficult to hear weak dx.
So there it is.. if you want to hear the whispering DX get a better receiving sytem and keep it separate from the transmitting side.. in other word two ham stations in one shack! It has made the differnce bewtween hearing the JA's, working them and NOT!
On the outbound signal, I prefere to use more stable radios with signal processing rather than the old rigs.